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"content": "(Mr. Omingo): Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, thank you for giving me a chance to contribute and support this Bill. The speaker who has just sat down can convince even the unconvinced ones. Today, I believe this Bill is going to be passed unanimously. We cannot burry our heads in the sand as the good lady has said, because GMOs are here. If they are here we must find ways of managing them scientifically. Let us test them and have them on board. Sometimes there are no guidelines; people will practise and enjoy without thinking about how it affects our people. Where I come from is a land of honey and milk as it pertains to rain and fertility of the soil. We embraced GMO seeds without necessarily having to test whether they worked well for us or not. We never had something like this or scientists who could test the soil in Kisii. So, our people started starving. By the way, the maize that could grow to double my height became almost half my height and could not carry the \"babies\" on their \"backs\", because they were too short. That was because we assumed it was not and yet it was. So, it is important for all of us to stand up and be counted. Again, when computers came to this country, people were running away. People feared that they were going to lose jobs. But can we do without them now? The issue is, please change and let us get going. The best we can do is to get involved and be educated and have others learn. If we fake ignorance, people are going to be misled and will start rejecting some tea-cutting machines, and the result will be that efficiency will go down; people will starve and we shall be helpless. The fact is that if we have to feed our people then we have to sign on the dotted lines to helplessness. So, we must embrace changes as they come. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, Kenya is also part of the international organisation that signed the convention on biodiversity in 1992. So, we cannot pretend to run away from it, otherwise we will be left behind. So, the convention on biodiversity, which is aimed at promoting sustainable development is an issue which we need to embrace, in terms of creating the framework for trying to manage our food security. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, Kenya being what it is and even an agricultural economy, I listened to the Minister for Agriculture speak and I was quite inspired that that is the route to go to feed our people. People have talked and agonized on how we need to feed our people. If we continue using cow dung as fertilizer today, we will not increase that yield. We might want to maintain originality, produce that food here and eat it here, but when you travel, for example, to the United States of America (USA), you eat GMOs. Would you carry your food to America? The world has become a global village. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, Article 8 of the Convention I have just mentioned requires parties to that convention to regulate and manage or contain risks associated with the Genetically Modified foods. Kenya, in the Cartegena Protocol is part of it. Now, what I said earlier was that if we have those seeds around here, will they work for us? In fact, with regulation, we are not going to be used as guinea pigs. What is happening today is that when it fails elsewhere and they cannot sell it, they dump it here. With this Biosafety Bill, I believe our scientists are going to be engaged and as the previous speaker said - I enjoyed her contribution - we have the best brains around town. Our papers in the shelf are the most brilliant papers that we can ever have, but do we use them? Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, on the area of trade, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), we are party to these international trade practices. For example, in some countries you cannot export a particular food unless it is of particular diameter size. Are you going to plant, weed, consume and not export? December 2, 2008 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 3777 What do you do with the surplus? We must embrace biodiversity. For example, if you went to Russia and engineered a long stemmed flower that those people who participate in opera shows keep throwing to the dias to impress and cheer up the participating artists, one stem costs US$50. A bouquet of flowers as we know them today is about US$16. That is a whole bunch of flowers and we are targeting the rich market of this world. That is the way to go. Are you comfortable carrying a bulk of flowers in the European market for US$15 when you can take a stem to Russia which is genetically modified and scientifically done with a stem of a bigger size for US$50? We must think outside the box, otherwise we are going to be swallowed by modern times. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, Kenya is part of the New Partnership for Development (NEPAD) programme where we have embraced agricultural reforms to achieve economic growth in terms of economic development. How are we doing it? We are a member of a community of nations and that is where we are supposed to go. Partly also, in terms of our policy framework, we have embraced the issue of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). About 191 nations have embraced the attainment of MDGs by 2015. We are still keeping our long horned animals. They can hardly give you a glass of milk and yet they eat the same food. You employ one person to guard them and keep grumbling that the international community is managing their agricultural sector better to the extent that their agricultural production is higher. We must not keep on shielding ourselves. There is a time limit to international negotiation on trade practices; it is going to come to an end. We cannot pretend to sit here and guard ourselves against the international community for time on end. We must embrace this technology. The way to go is that way. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I agree that it comes with its side effects but we must look at the postives and the negatives. Even if the negatives weigh less than the positives, let us correct them. I think that is the way to go. We have a variety of crops here today some of which are not scientifically placed in the area they are supposed to be to the extent that we are leaving the very fabric of society. It is for this reason, that we want to be part of this programme of embracing biodiversity for purposes of increased food productivity. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, if we had a well fed nation, our medical bills would go down by 70 per cent. I embrace grafted bananas. I think it is only that most of us like playing to the gallery. Let us own up. Sometimes let us say yes for what it is and grab it and run with it. If you look at the issue of the cost of medication, if we had a well fed nation as I said, medical bills would come down by a half. Even fighting HIV and AIDS, you are giving people drugs to swallow on an empty stomach. Some of them opt to sell the anti-retrovirals so that they can buy food. Now, it becomes counterproductive to lose a human being who would have entered in the productive sector. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I want only to make one or two comments on the opening paragraphs in Section 1 and I think Madam Minister will look into this. It has been a practice here and I am not talking about this Minister, but in the previous Parliament where we passed Bills here and implementation took a lot of time. We want to see this actualised and I will beseech Members of Parliament to bring an amendment that upon passing of this Bill, it must be law in six months. You should operationalise that. We must be able to give results to our taxpayers so that if it is passed today, within six months we have a law that is operationalised. I remember the case of the Ministry of Finance last year. It took two and a half years to actually operationalise the Privatisation Bill and it took this House and the Speaker to push us to do our duty. If that is too much to do on the other side, parliamentarians need to do that in this House and tell our Minister that she needs to do a bit of ground work and see what it takes to operationalise this Bill. If it is a year, it should be operational within that one year. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, most importantly as I conclude, it is important that we address the current economic times. Some of the biggest issues that arise in the negotiations by 3778 PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES December 2, 2008 WTO is agricultural products. Agricultural products have their standards in terms of international manufacture, standards and quality. The only way we are going to walk in that market without crying foul on subsidised crops out there is embracing the volume for quality of production in terms of scale and that we embrace the issue of modern times. With those many remarks, I support."
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